Book on N.Y. reminds S.F. that cities constantly evolve
Anyone who knows and cares about a city like San Francisco carries fragments of the city that are gone. The city in which we constructed our lives.
We remember the shops drowned by rising rents and low spots on the skyline where towers now stand. People of different generations and classes and races who marked the boundary of our daily routines, and urban landscapes remade into something unsettling — unsettling to our notion of how our city ought to be.
“The city’s failures evolve but never vanish, and a sense of nostalgic pessimism dogs even periods of uplift,” Justin Davidson writes in the new book “Magnetic City: A Walking Companion to New York.” “If you stay long enough, you get to grumble in one decade about junkies and criminals taking over the streets and, in the next, that they have fled, taking authenticity with them.”
The title is enough to convey the physical focus of the guide by Davidson, New York magazine’s architecture and classical music critic. His lone venture off Manhattan in the book is a bicycle journey from Harlem to the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. But his impressions resonate much further, and they pertain to other prosperous cities in a perennial struggle between the future and the past.
In our case, San Francisco coined the term Manhattanization — that fearsome scourge conjured up in the 1970s and ’80s as a symbol of the
windswept, shadowed wasteland in store if more and more tall office buildings were allowed to march toward neighborhoods like North Beach.
Towers were “the hard drugs of architecture,” argued the 1971 book “The Ultimate Highrise,” published by the San Francisco Bay Guardian. It kicked off with a long chapter on “38 Clues to Manhattanization,” explaining how the “monstrous machines” weren’t just “freakish and absurd.” They had brought New York, and now San Francisco, “to the brink of fiscal and social chaos.”
These days the warning is turned on its head.
Local opponents of growth point to Manhattan’s hyper-affluence as the danger. Younger Bay Area residents, meanwhile, eagerly visit New York for its culture and charged sense that something new is always going on. If they know the term Manhattanization, they shrug it off.
Davidson’s book contains both Manhattans and many others: the colonial enclave and the industrial powerhouse. The prim retreats of the cultured wealthy and the bodegas on the fringe.
He also understands that each new layer is a valid part of the ongoing story.
“Someone is always complaining that the city is dying or dead, someone is always willing to write it off as too poor or too rich to matter anymore,” Davidson writes. He arrived as a college student in the 1980s, when the downward spire of prior decades could still be felt in burned-out blocks in the Bronx and abandoned downtown warehouses cherished by would-be artists: “It was a ruin in the making, and my friends and I were ... enthralled by decay and eager for more.”
San Francisco never hit those depths, thankfully, but Manhattan’s monied resurgence of recent years will ring familiar — a time when waterfronts became recreation zones and precious restaurants sprouted.
“This frantic pursuit of pleasantness dispossessed many and enraged more,” Davidson reports. “Gentrification became a term of daily opprobrium, as the prosperous horned in on one neglected neighborhood after another. Gentrifiers grumbled when gentrification failed to stop with them.”
Here’s the catch: Tumult is a constant in cities like ours. Neighborhoods rise and fall and rise again. Some industries take hold, others move on. The innovations that reshape life beyond our region, such as the evermore pernicious and pervasive spread of social media, circle back to bite us, along with cities as a whole.
Look no further than the thinning out of bookstores by online retailing, or print media’s efforts to make peace with the wireless devices where you might be reading this column. If the Mission still attracts migrants, too many are migrants who can pay rents that in turn can displace lower-income migrants.
None of this is minimized in “Magnetic City.” It shouldn’t be minimized here.
Yet we also need to realize that urban dynamics are never as simple as they seem. A city’s final chapter is never written.
Many of the newcomers to San Francisco or the Bay Area want to strike Silicon Valley gold, absolutely. Others are drawn by the cultural openness that attracted the beatniks in the 1950s, the hippies in the 1960s, gays and lesbians in the 1970s and punks in the 1980s. The extremes at the center of what make this place a mecca, again and again.
Writing about New York, Davidson observes: “This is a city of tenacious ghosts.” That observation pertains to San Francisco as well — and it is one of the things that might save us.